Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 04, 2008 @04:28AM
from the didn't-see-that-coming-did-you dept.

4WebChimps writes "As featured previously on Slashdot, the KOffice project is working towards a cross-platform, open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The most recent release, KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8, achieved that goal by being the first release for all three operating systems simultaneously. Want to try KOffice on Windows? TechWorld has a review (with screenshots) of KOffice on Windows, including the installation process which is as simple as clicking a few buttons (the online installer does the rest). Hopefully it won't be long before KOffice sits alongside OpenOffice.org as a usable cross-platform open source productivity suite."

What do you mean native? MSOffice uses it's own toolkit, not the standard windows toolkit. KOffice is using QT, so that's non-standard too.

Look, think about it as a positive. Lots of people are testing the same UI on different platforms so any bugs found on Linux will be fixed in Windows too. Also users can move between operating systems without having a radically different interface.

Microsoft Office earns them 10 billion and a part of that is coming out of your country's economy -- competition in the form of KOffice is very good indeed. It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.

Yep - KWrite (and its multi-document container app Kate) are part of the KDE on WIndows, and have been available since KDE 4.0 was released some months ago. While some of Kate's features weren't quite there, it was still eminently suitable for working on some C code.

This "cross-platform UI" thing in OO.o is ridiculous. It looks like shit, at least the GTK interface. Even the scrollbars aren't correct if you look closely, and refreshing issues make the equation editor nearly unusable. This is because their GUI abstraction layer is FUBAR.

There are only 3 corect ways here:1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit

There are only 3 corect ways here:
1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets
2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit devs sort out the look on ach platform
3. Write a native interface for each platform

Actually, OO.o uses number 1. The main problem of course that OO.o is too old: many parts were coded by many people in different times on different platforms. That's why it looks and behaves like total junky - independent of platform you are running it on.

But my first though was that you #1 is impossible. Because you chain yourself to update your application - eternally - to catch up with all the little UI improvement introduced with every minor OS update. It's just not practical. Or better say, it does

You don't understand my point #1. #1 means a GUI that looks completely out of whack of how the rest of the OS looks, but is the same on most platforms. Like a Swing application mith Metal style. What you refer to is a combination of 1, 2 and 3. They attempt to emulate the look of the platform, and they supply a different emulation for each platform they support, but they don't touch the platform's native widget interface. This way is doomed to eternal brokenness, and at this point I agree with you.

The benefit is that the installer will take care of dependencies, so that the user doesn't have to install a >100 MB package for each program she wants, or to install a huge package of apps if she only wants a few.

It's a valid point - very few people in the real world care or understand about what a shared library is even if you tell them carefully. Let's face it - being into computers is not a majority thing. Most people don't give a stuff. They really just want things to work easily for them.

That's a perfectly valid point, but those people shouldn't pollute Slashdot with their silly complaints. Back in the days, people who self-identified as "nerds" would have endless and pointless discussions of making Linux-powered robots that could brew coffee, or configuring Emacs to do it or whatever (single-threaded coffee, urgh), but these days there's a loud majority of Slashbots who seem to think that market share is the only valid goal and hence the only valid technical goal is that idiots should be able to use it: the idiot as the epitome and endpoint of human technical endeavours.

These people claim the superiority of "it just works" over "how does it work?", and regularly chip in with smug Apple sales pitches, technically and socially impossible suggestions such as that Gnome and KDE should merge, and that software with special dependencies should work just as software without those. The only positive way to deal with these idiots is with sarcasm. I'm sure that if we cared about their views, then we should listen to them, but we shouldn't.

I dunno exactly how hard it is to explain, but remember this... you are talking about trying to explain software dependencies to people who do not yet understand that hardware needs software to run. They can't wrap their minds around drivers. I should know. I have to try to explain things like this every day at the repair shop I work at.

These people also think that their hard drives are the same as their ram, since both refer to the same units (MB and GB). I can't tell you how many times a customer will

The problem is not that there is an installer that takes care of the depenencies. It is that *every* *damn* *program* needs its/own/ installer.

What we need is something akin to a torrent program, where the dependencies and actual program are transmitted to one program whose extension is registered with a universal handler. This is no different than apt or those other page management solutions.

The distinction is that grandparent post is complaining about an exe, and I agree that he shouldn't have an exe - t

While style is not unimportant, I'm quite a bit more interested in reasonable features, stability, and keyboard navigation.
Here's a shout out to all ma homiez that really don't require a skinnable, theme-able printing dialog!

It's great that they've made it to Windows, but it needs some polish. And how about a new theme too eh? Windows doesn't look like Windows 3.11 anymore, but this default theme still does. That's an easy fix that should be included in the next version.

since it's so easy why don't you do that? unfortunately there a lot of dependencies in kdelibs like dbus, soprano, strigi etc.. most of these are mandatory but there are also other optional requirement that are checked at compile time, so we can't build 10 kinds of kdelibs(or package xxx) just to disable something
it's like linux distro you can't choose to install qt4 with ssl support or without it but you'll get what's available

An online installer shouldn't be 20mb, it should be less than 2mb and pull in just the components necessary to install the rest of the program. The exact size is going to vary from application to application.

The point of online installers is that they are in theory at least going to be downloading just what you're installing. If a program doesn't offer any options in terms of what to install, it shouldn't offer an online installer as there isn't really any benefit to doing so.

it seems to be a kind of mini package manager that runs on windows, that allows you to install kde apps the same way you do on linux. so this installer thing doesnt just install koffice - it stays on your system and allows you to install and uninstall any other kde apps that become available for windows in the future.

i think i heard that kde have a long term plan of being able to run a full KDE desktop session on top of windows - presumably this package manager is the foundation of that ultimate goal.

Indeed, I was hoping they would be a little more quick with it, but I think you are right in saying "long term plan" was about right, although I imagine that if its anything like Slashdot (et al) that trying to find people to blaspheme and create Windows stuff is a problem.

Although, im not sure where the 20MB's came from now anyways (I responded before even looking).. but after looking [kde.org] the installer is only 1.6MB... which isnt too bad, seeing how many languages it supports, and the fact it may even come with 2 different compilers aswell...

AFAIK KDE-lib depends on many libraries. It would be a waste of bandwidth to bundle these libraries to every KDE-program. If you install Amarok and Koffice you should not need to download these libraries twice.

At least atm the windows version is still kinda linuxy. If you look at the first screenshot in the article, it's the list of dependencies the installer's going to download. If you really want to, you can download all of them manually, put them in the packages directory and it will use them during installation. But that's a pretty crazy way of doing this.

It should be quite easy to create an image containing KOffice and all dependencies (perhaps with a seperate image for kdelibs+Qt) that you can download and

Yes! Why do developers assume that every computer has a fast, always-on connection to the internet? Some computers, for reasons of security, practicality, expense or other reasons, are not connected (or only sometimes connected, or slowly connected). If I can't download a full package that can be installed on another computer from a USB flash drive, then that's a program I won't be installing.

Because the older versions of Qt that the old KDE was built on was only free/Free on Linux. Windows Qt used to be only available with a expensive commercial license, and nobody from KDE felt like paying for the privilege of supplying free software to Windows users.

This is where Java shines. In C++, you can use platform-independent frameworks, but still you need for each and every platform to setup (possibly virtual) machine with compilation build-chain, installation process, and you better test if final result really works or some library is missing. Assuming you don't use 64-bit version of each platform, which doubles maintenance/QA effort. After all this you just *hope* you don't recieve that "Your app regularly crash on my FreeBSD x.y.z !" e-mail. For big projects like KDE/KOffice obviously this is problem, hence delay of KOffice Windows version, for small development team it is *huge* problem. This is why I really love Java, I almost forgot all STL incompatibility issues and C++ compiler nuances. Its not that Java program cannot behave different on various platforms, its that I encountered it once for last 3 years, and its fixed already in Java 6.

The port was available in 2004 already, but just not maintained. The KDE 4 port is available on Windows since I compiled the stuff in September 2007.

People are just not aware of that.

The problem is the deployment of alpha software, we have no volunteers to even make good screenshots (the article shows GIMP on one of them!). Don't expect developers to work more than 24h a day:)

Again, there is single codebase in most KDE apps (minus examples like Konsole), no "hard porting" is needed except work on dependencies that are non-Qt, e.g. less portable filter dependencies for Krita.

While this is certainly great news for KDE realistically we are going to be able to count the number of Windows users on one hand. There will be plenty of people (me included) that will down load it to see how good it is but then never use it again because it's incompatable with other office software*. While I know it can read ODF and.doc etc it doesn't do it well enough that it's a drop in replacement for MS Office or even Open Office.

Personally I really hope that they port Kontact soon. It's streets ahead of Thunderbird and a half way decent competitor to Outlook.

If word can't correctly read and format 99.99% of ODF documents perfectly it's not fully compatible with ODF. At 99.99% you are talking about 1 in 10000 documents having a formatting error (it's actually probably better than that because the problems are most likely to appear in rarely used formatting types but the idea is good). That isn't a fantastic level of realiability IMHO. In a company where 100 people are using Office that would mean one user would see a fault every 100 documents. I could easily ima

This is funny. Imagine going to your boss and telling him that some Office bug would cause small rendering errors in 10% of your documents, mandating fixes in up to 1% of old documents that needed re-use. He'd be very slightly concerned.

Now tell him that it'll cost a few thousand dollars to remedy this, you'll have to accept vendor lock-in to prevent it, and that even that version has errors, just fewer, with your documents. You'd need to hire a portability expert to check all the documents for problems and

KOffice is different from OO and MSOffice in that it has a clean codebase and is written for a toolkit which actually also is used for something else. Even microsoft doesn't eat its own dogfood and steers clear of dot net for MSOffice. In this way KOffice must be faster growing and could have a nice future.

Of course the fact that I'm not a coder, and have no way of knowing the answer to this is irrelevant. I'm sure I can find the answer to my question SOMEWHERE, proffered by someone who DOES claim to know.

The divide between "makers" and "users" of software has NEVER been so evident.

His point about a clean code base is that it lowers the bar for new developers to join the project. By comparison, OOo internals are supposed to be a nightmare maze of twisty little passages and difficult to learn.

This was the reason why Apple originally chose KDE's KHTML source code over Mozilla's Gecko. Clean, lean, code that was easy to understand, debug and extend. The fruits of that we see today in Safari and Webkit. [webkit.org]

On thing that concerns me - Linux-style package management is something that anyone who has been using Linux for any length of time will know and understand - but for a general 'Doze user to suddenly be told "you want to install packages A, B, +C, which require packages X, Y, +Z", this is going to set off all sorts of alarms.
A lot of Windows users are (finally) getting used to the idea that some software will try and install all manner of nasties, they are going to see this list of additional software that needs installing, and freak out, meaning theyre not going to install it.
Pity, as this looks as if it could potentially be a viable alternative to MS Orifice or OpenOffice.

I think your concern is justified, but can they not release a single installer with all necessary files as needed? Windows users would have to wait for someone to release a stable build but I don't see the problem with that. The rest of use can just run it on Linux.

A single installer would be great - but going off the 6th screen-shot, adding additional features later would invoke the download of extra packages that you didnt explicitly ask for.
With my Linux user hat on, I'm thinking "Ok, go ahead" - but with my 'Doze admin hat on, my first instinct is "ok, so whats going on here then?"

I agree. The way that Windows package management, if you will, is geared towards single file binary installers. Or, a network admin install, as MSI supports both. Really, I haven't seen much legit use of DLLs as they were intended (shared libraries) when it comes to applications. After "DLL Hell" everyone just started statically linking in the libraries, and can you blame them? I mean, MSI does have some really cool features, but dependency tracking for DLLs is not one of them.

I routinely have statically linked executables that will just refuse to uninstall and I can't get rid of the entry. Then I'm stuck ripping out shards of the program from every folder structure and the registry... for the next two years. At that point, they're still resident when I blow away my OS partition and steamroller a new Windows install.

People are used to Windows install routines by now; you get the programName-setup.exe or.msi, double click on it, and watch the bar go across the screen. And, for the most part, Windows does this well, barring the usual head-desk moments that we all love (aha! let's use spaces in the %programfiles% directory name and then half support them and leave everyone guessing where they should put quotes!) and I don't think that we should try force Linux style library schemes on to a system that doesn't want or need it. Doubly so for users that won't understand it!

Full disclosure: I run Slackware and Windows at home (and BSD and Mac) and prefer to compile from source, at work we use RHEL and Windows and if not for the ease of having repositories, I'd take MSI-2/3 over RPM-2/3 any day of the week.

I mean, MSI does have some really cool features, but dependency tracking for DLLs is not one of them.

Take a look at C:\Windows\WinSxS on an XP SP2 or later system. MSI won't magically download stuff on demand, and I don't think it does "this version _or better_ handling", but it will save you from having ten different copies of the VC++8.0 runtime on your machine, and I think will allow commonly redistributed libraries to have a common copy receive a security update via Windows Update.

Really, I haven't seen much legit use of DLLs as they were intended (shared libraries) when it comes to applications. After "DLL Hell" everyone just started statically linking in the libraries, and can you blame them? I mean, MSI does have some really cool features, but dependency tracking for DLLs is not one of them.

I'd have to give Microsoft some credit for trying at least, I guess. MSI installers do support Merge Modules, which help the OS to track what's been installed and what hasn't, and will un-inst

If it's free software it'll be useless, and you'll be stupid for talking about it, unless it's perfect. Not just working, but looking.

On the other hand, if it's commercial software... I have Canon CD (printer stuff I think) that installs 4 apps and drivers, with multiple popup windows, different progress bars, etc. Anyways - a train wreck. And it's not that uncommon.

What we need to do is charge, a lot, for KOffice. Then people will love it. At $100 each they'll warm to it. At $500/seat they'll love it, at $

It's not undoable by any account, but it goes against how the platform natively views a package. It just means that it will be extra effort to do things like updates. As with all things, it's just usually easier to use the underlying platforms built in functionality than to work around it. Windows mostly views an application as a monolithic entity (which makes sense for pushing updates as deltas) rather than a collection of packages.

Regardless of the platform, I'm pretty sure you can include and link to your own libraries if you think the targeted platform may not have them.

What's really needed is for the LSB to finish ironing out a point of standardization for Linux packages so that all package managers can easily install software packages so that you'll have smaller downloads and better installation management when installing out-of-the-repo software. For Windows users though, it's highly unlikely that they will have any of the req

this is going to set off all sorts of alarms. A lot of Windows users are (finally) getting used to the idea that some software will try and install all manner of nasties, they are going to see this list of additional software that needs installing, and freak out, meaning theyre not going to install it. Pity, as this looks as if it could potentially be a viable alternative to MS Orifice or OpenOffice.

in a year or two, as this ports mature, Windows and OSX are going to be flooded with KDE free software: Amarok music player, Gwenview image viewer, Digikam photo manager, Kopete instant messenger, and many many more.
I think this is exciting news but probably a bit scary for commercial ISVs...

Firefox was the single greatest tool for me to use to help people realize there's options other than Windows and OSX. On Linux or BSD: "Oh wow, it's exactly the same!" I've even run across a fair few people who are familiar with VLC or pidgin or maybe some other solid F/OSS program to show them that trying something that isn't made by MS or Apple doesn't mean it's going to be completely different or foreign or difficult. If KDE stuff spreads onto Windows and OSX as you're predicting, as unintuitive as it

Personally, I really like Amarok... Winamp is a close second imho, and iTunes is an abomination by comparison... would love to see it on windows and osx..:) I know you can force-feed amarok into osx, but it isn't very nice yet.

I've been a TeX user most of my working life. But since becoming a teacher, I've realized that I need a word processor for making pretty handouts. Each one of my handouts is layed out differently, so doing that in TeX was taking too much time.

But, OOWriter is driving me batty. Really, I just need to make numbered paragraphs with numbered points underneath. I need to be able to paste pretty clipart and wrap paragraphs around or through them. I need to be able to write Japanese text. And I need to be able to output PDF (optionally doc file format too).

It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.

So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?

I'm a teacher and I use TeX almost always to write handouts. Occasionally I get compliments on the nice and professional look:)
Anyway, my usual choice for a "word processor" is Abiword, along with Gnumeric for spreadsheets. They may be a little on the light/simple side of things, but at least they don't try overthink you.

Last I checked it was at 1.5.5 and it is really easy to use. A lot of time that you otherwise waste with formatting is simply saved by its approach. Given you already have experience of using TeX you might like it.

So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?

Try Scribus. [scribus.net] It's a nice little desktop publishing program that does quite a bit, (with more being added each release) although it's nowhere near as powerful as Indesign, Quark, or Framemaker. I personaly use the 1.3.4 development version but the stable version is still useful. Note: Files created in a

It isn't free, but the ONLY word processor I've found that is reasonably capable and doesn't fuck up my formatting is WordPerfect. I've used versions 8-11, so I can't speak for the latest version, but for the versions I have used, nothing comes close in ease of formatting. It's a shame that its Word compatibility isn't perfect, otherwise I wouldn't be stuck using Word for every document that I have to exchange.

Oh, WordPerfect. The only Windows software I miss on Linux. Was a (paying) user since the 5.1 DOS version until around MS-Windows 2000. "Reveal codes" was a thing of beauty when handling lots of different documents form different pc's and platforms. Kerning etc. gave superior printresults compared to MS-Word. Had to ditch WP and stop recommending it to others since Corel never did update its dictionary since the DOS version in my native language.

I believe MS now owns a controlling share in the company now owning WP, IMHO mostly to prevent that WordPerfect gets ported to QT and becomes a multi-platform wordprocessor on both Windows, Linux and OSX.

No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout.

Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had a

No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout.Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had about

Ha ha... I used to be a developer on Word Perfect:-). But I'm afraid that it too doesn't work nearly as well as I'd like (maybe I'm sensitive). However, the reveal codes certainly let you fix problems that crop up.

Someone above has already mentioned Lyx, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are already using the KDE environment, there is also Kile [sourceforge.net] which is a Latex front-end app similar to Lyx, but for KDE.

It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.

You have just described my experience over the last several years with MS Word 2000/2003 with numbered/bulleted lists. I have to write lots of SOPs which use lists, and

It's a good start! It fires up OK, but cannot open any documents (message says: "Cannot read from start of file"). There are also still a lot of crashes which is to be expected - but unfortunately it leaves a whole load of KDE processes running when it does so.
Looks fantastic though, and it starts surprisingly fast. I really hope this becomes stable enough to be a viable alternative to MS/Open Office.

Provided they all support open formats in a consistent way (which, last time I checked, sadly wasn't the case: mostly formatting differences), what would it matter if there are multiple suites operating correctly with those formats? I some like the interface of OpenOffice, others Abiword, and some KOffice. As lang as I can move files across them with full compatibility, I'm happy.
I agree that the OpenOffice team needs to do something fast. Apart from very minor changes I can't tell 0.9 apart from 3.0. I t

Having at least two cross-platform office suites gives people choice. You don't have to like ooo's interface/speed/memory usage because now you have Koffice, and if you don't like Koffice, you have ooo, abiword-gnumeric, etc.

I personally, like Koffice a lot more than ooo, maybe the ooo team could work together with Koffice:).

Qt4 made major improvements which allowed for KDE4 to be easier ported to Windows.

For KOffice to function, you have to have KDE4 installed. And the installer from RTFA is essentially alpha installer for KDE4 for Windows - now also including KOffice. Even if you would select only KOffice, most of KDE4 would be also installed since KOffice depends on it.